The nation’s environment will continue to worsen if environmental groups and the government cannot find a middle ground between economic development and environmental protection, photographer and film director Chi Po-lin (齊柏林) said yesterday.
The director of the box-office smash Beyond Beauty: Taiwan From Above (看見台灣), which has made more than NT$200 million (US$6.59 million) since it premiered on Nov. 1 last year, made the remark at a public forum at National Taiwan University.
Many of the beautiful full-screen scenes in the documentary were the result of careful framing, because the land has really been fractured and damaged, he said, adding that up to 90 percent of the western coastline is now covered in concrete and more than 300 fishing ports around the nation have damaged the natural scenery.
Photo: Lin Cheng-kung, Taipei Times
After his aerial photographs and film clips triggered a local government to fine or shut down companies over illegal wastewater discharges, one company owner complained that it was unreasonable to close his company just for polluting a river, Chi said. This shows that some people still lack environmental consciousness, he said.
Showing a photograph of tea bushes on steep mountain slopes, Chi said the overuse of land has led to erosion and landslides when typhoons bring heavy rain to mountainous areas, and the government then has to rush to fix roads in these areas after disasters.
“They never stop planting, even if the land erodes, because they can make money. I understand that the people who build hotels or grow crops on top of mountains do so to make a living. However, I think the government bears much of the responsibility for the problems because it ignored these issues for so long,” he said.
Although his documentary may have caused problems for some people, if no one pays attention to the overuse of mountain land, then natural disasters could take a heavier toll on these people’s lives and property, he said.
“I think it is very common in Taiwan for everyone to stick to their own opinions, be unwilling to communicate rationally and unable to agree on a consensus … we are often arguing between 1 and 0, unable to compromise and accept 0.5 as the middle ground,” Chi said.
“When issues are ignored because civic groups and the government cannot reach a consensus, the end results may actually be damaging to both sides,” he said.
Several environmental groups criticized Beyond Beauty: Taiwan From Above for not taking a more critical viewpoint and showing some of the even more serious environmental problems facing the nation, but it was important to make the film acceptable to a wider public, so that the message of loving Taiwan’s environment could spread to more people, he said.
National Taiwan University geology professor Hongey Chen (陳宏宇) said that from his field investigations after major natural disasters over the years, the nation’s land is already shattered and broken, with villages in mountainous areas often faced with “floods in front, collapsed slopes in back and landslides next to them.”
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,